A growing trend among businesses is to allow employees to use their personally owned mobile devices both to access company resources and to use and access their personal applications and data. This trend, known as “bring your own device” (“BYOD”), significantly complicates the task of protecting enterprise resources, including confidential and/or sensitive information, as well as provides the opportunity for the user to inadvertently post messages using an inappropriate communication account.
For example, it is common for a user to have multiple e-mail, social media and other communication accounts managed by the same mobile device. For instance, a social manager may have an official company Twitter® handle as well as a personal Twitter® handle. A message could be posted to either account via the same application on the mobile device. As a result, it is not uncommon for the user to accidentally post a message to one of the accounts (e.g., corporate account) that was meant to be posted to the other account (e.g., personal account) which contained some questionable content. In such situations, the user may even lose his/her job as a result of the accidental posting.
In another example, a user may send company confidential information through the user's personal e-mail account (e.g., Gmail® account), as opposed to the user's company e-mail account, with less security controls thereby posing a potential security leak.
Attempts have been made to address security leaks via the use of authentication credentials. However, in the BYOD scenario, the user would still be able to send confidential or sensitive information across multiple communication channels since the user has valid authentication credentials. Furthermore, the user's posting of a message, such as a message containing company confidential information, using an inappropriate communication account (e.g., personal e-mail account) may be accidental.
Unfortunately, there is not currently a means for preventing such erroneous communications.